Tannenbaum trunk show

By recycling the bottom of the family Christmas tree, this family has cultivated its own tradition

To some, holiday traditions include baking cookies together or trimming the evergreen with fragile ornaments made back when the children were small.

Gerry DeBenedetti and children Cassie Senner, 44, and Grant Senner, 36, have taken holiday decorating a step further. Every year for most of the last 35, they've recycled their live Christmas tree, cutting off the bottom and decorating the base with trinkets collected throughout the year. DeBenedetti keeps a crafts box stuffed with so-called "broken pieces of junk" and other assorted odds and ends just for the occasion.

"Our trees are clear up to the rafters, and we've saved the bottoms every year," said DeBenedetti. "So we mark on the bottoms who did it and the year. It's a very easy thing to make."

Among the celebrated pieces are little dioramas of gingerbread men pinned to a clothesline and an army of snowmen buried in a forest.

The pieces, melded together with school-grade glue, have held up over three decades. The tradition began with daughter Cassie, then a preteen. "She made the first one as a Christmas present to me," said DeBenedetti. "The second year, we save the tree bottom and decorated that one, too."

Now the family is far flung, with son Grant on Maui and Cassie in Australia and Fiji much of the year. Unwrapping the tree stumps takes the normally not-so-sentimental DeBenedetti back to another time, when she, her late husband Clair Folsome, Cassie and Grant celebrated Christmases past in their family home on Waialae Nui Ridge.

But DeBenedetti, an admitted fan of collecting, is not the only one to turn nostalgic. On one visit to her current home in Kaimuki, Cassie began weeping unexpectedly as she unwrapped the ornaments. "She got out the annual decorations and just cried," recalled DeBenedetti. "She's out there with the boxes on the deck, saying, 'Oh, I remember this.' ...

"Now the tree bottoms are part of the decorations. It all goes up the first week of December, and I check off the tree bottoms on my list. ... It's the tree bottoms that people ooh and ahh over."